Introduction: Reclaiming Our Humanity
This introduction begins a new blog series on Reclaiming our Humanity. This series stands as my own response to myself, and recent posts I have written naming various ills and evils of our world. I began with broad strokes in “The Trifecta of Evil” and picked apart 3 specific issues, and then I started delving into power here and here.
I document and name the pathologies and toxicities I see within myself, my culture, my world. Facing these hard things is a first step in reclaiming our humanity, and our re-entry into a healthy and generative place within Creation. Denial and nostalgia are significant obstacles to our spiritual and cultural growth and development.
Rather than feed any scapegoating or make it easy to detach ourselves from complicity, I decided to discuss the systemic, that whole which is larger than any data set of parts. Concern about the loss of our national security and safety nets has had me thinking about what we have built, what we are inheriting, what we are passing on in regards to our systems of care. The first post in this series was called “Our Deep Systems of Inhumanity” and was an attempt to name the deep brokenness in a few of our least functional systems, education and healthcare. The second post called “Reclaiming Our Humanity: Systems are People, People Are Systems” spoke broadly about systems themselves, and how I’ll use that idea in context.
We will be well served to more deeply understand the systems around us, how we encounter them, what we can do to affect them. We must engage the powers in order to transform them, we must engage the powers to recall them to their highest purposes. We must stand free of their control over us, the use of fear and momentum, expectation and convention, to dictate our behavior. For we have all we need to build generative and life-giving systems.
System Disruption
I love the intricacies of system work, and have been exploring and experimenting with ways to tweak systems for most of my life. Not that I knew this was what I was doing for the first 20 years or so, but nonetheless, this was the work.
In my mid-20s, I wrote my own Bachelor degree curriculum, and gathered a committee of faculty to guide me. This might seem like masterful system manipulation, but in fact a family friend was the Dean of a small College on a large university campus developed to provide exactly this kind of flexibility. The personal connection gave me the knowledge to access this option. I am sure I would never have looked for such a choice, and might have failed at forcing myself into a more structured education system.
I certainly hadn’t figured out how to make it work the first time I’d tried undergrad. I did learn about systems, but as they churned me up and spit me out. I crashed headfirst into so many dysfunctional and damaging systems -the good ol’ boy network of harassment and assault protection, the southern criminal justice system, a hierarchy of greed and negligence, and the manic chaos of radical earth defenders- that I had a breakdown after my 22nd birthday, a slow and agonizing breakdown. I didn’t see any ways out of the stark realities of war and climate degradation, and I couldn’t seem to find my footing.
I have always been sure that without the radical disruptions over the next year in my young life -my father’s death and my marriage- I too would have been a victim of or at least derailed by these systems. Several of my friends didn’t make it to 30. I slowly rebuilt my understanding of the world, and found multiple ways to integrate a more engaged relationship with the systems around me.
For decades, I was committed to making change within The Episcopal Church, a Christian denomination fully entrenched in systems of privilege, but also full of resources and creativity. This potential is part of what makes its inability to see itself as part of the problem so heart breaking.
For decades, I was committed to making change through the Democratic party, but its system of entrenchment and entitlement is more toxic than the church’s. Outside of specific and few local areas, it has fallen apart as a functioning representative body.
I’ve never tried to make much headway in the world of academia, but I am very aware that it too needs deep system reformation. However, I am considering re-entering that world in some way, and I am glad that I have a more sophisticated comprehension of systems than I used to, were I to choose that route.
Loyalty to a system itself with no regard to the effects of that system is dangerous. There is a chasm between faithfulness, discipline and blind adherence in both outcome and process. Most of the systems at work in America right now do not serve the common good, those in need, or any future generations. They do not ensure our health, safety, and general welfare and yet we seem paralyzed to change them. We know our systems do not reflect our values, and many of us do what we can to change the rules or mitigate the damage, but it always feels like playing catch up. Because it is.
Ten years ago, I stepped outside of the world of The Episcopal Church and removed that system’s power over me. My ordination as a minister of the gospel in the American Baptist Churches, USA, followed many of the same guidelines and had many of the same requirements but was marked by a holy disruption, a Good Trouble, that is a characteristic of The Holy Spirit’s work.
I live in a state where a third of the electorate has no political affiliation. Within the City and County of Denver, that percentage hovers in the low 50% range. A dual system of direct petitioning onto a ballot and a closed caucus with open primary access means that party affiliation is not necessary to have a political voice. Your participation may ensure better choices and I absolutely believe that is possible. It even happens here sometimes.
I wrote the following bit during the prayer time at my church last year, and I came across it while packing up my house. This message was the key I needed to help me think about all of this system-effect more concretely.
Drawing boundaries can startle and disrupt a system. Change the rules. Move the goal posts. Play a different game.
This we ask in all the names we call Holy. Amen.